Review Summary: A Turning Point in Music History.
Franz Liszt often compared playing the thematic material of the “Waldstein’s” exposition to chopping salad. The opening staccato 8th note C major chords requires a buoyancy in the fingers; if you press too hard you crumble the spine of the lettuce, but if you press to lightly you’re eating the whole stalk. The famous theme begins with two bars of left-hand salad chopping in a descending chromatic bass line from I to V. Bar three exhibits a frilly right hand major third leap in the V chord followed by a descending 16th note run landing back on a staccato dominant, followed by a similar ascending — descending leap and run, this time with a chromatic descent for variation. Bars five through twelve repeats the structure of bars one through four but with an added right hand chromatic flourish in the subdominant. With these twelve bars, you have the theme of a sonata considered by many to be part of the summit of classical piano literature.
Completed in the summer of 1804, approximately eight years after the advent of the famous fever that robbed Beethoven of his hearing, and dedicated to one of Beethoven’s many patrons, Count Ferdinand Ernst Gabriel von Waldstein of Vienna, Op. 53 is one of the most important, if not the most important, piano sonatas of Beethoven’s “Heroic” period. Famed critic Maynard Solomon wrote that with the “Waldstein” Beethoven, “moved irrevocably beyond the boundaries of the Classical keyboard style to create sonorities and textures never previously achieved”, […] stretching “the potentialities of both instrument and performance to their outer limits.” The form of each movement of Op. 53 speaks to Solomon’s observation. Aside from the joyous sonorities of movement one’s second theme, part of theme two’s beauty derives from a subconscious “ah-ha!” moment. For the second theme Beethoven repeats the rhythmic style of the last bar of theme one, a descending quarter note C minor arpeggio. Now, however, instead of following the typical sonata form schematic Haydn and Mozart popularized, where theme two always resides in V, Beethoven, carving out his own path, unprecedentedly sounds theme two in the mediant, E major. Music composition professors often note that the best composers can do the most with the faintest of motifs. Part of what constitutes the attractiveness of good classical music is how interwoven the melodies, harmonies, and rhythms are, how they play and fight with each other, and how they complement each other, each piece representing more than the sum of its parts. By the time theme two sounds you’ve already heard a similar chromatic descent and quarter note rhythm. Human beings seek patterns, and the repetition written into theme two pleases that basic impulse.
Beethoven, of course, was not the first to recognize that careful repetition makes good classical music. After all, the development section of sonata form was designed precisely to fulfill our pattern seeking impulses. However, using the same thematic material, Beethoven brings the listener through a series of tonality shifts. A typical development section often repeats the thematic material around the nexus of the dominant, which in this case is G major. Beethoven, however, begins the salad chopping in D minor followed by a series of harmonic modulations and melodic expansions. What results is a lovely array of tonal colors setting the precedent for the lush chromatic harmonies of Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, and other 19th century Romantic composers.
A short adagio in 6/8 time, Margarita Rodriquez explains the second movement as, “A sense of inner voices reaching up out of the texture, climbing over one another.” Instead of writing a fully bookended movement with a clear beginning and end, Beethoven uses this movement as an introduction to the third movement. While its cloudlike character does provide a contrast to the heroic character of the other movements, bucking the trend, the second movement essentially acts as a prelude for the powerful rondo, the focus for the entire sonata.
Monumental in scope, movement three alternates between three units of thematic material all different in character: soft and floating, titanic and driving, and heavenly and sublime. Much has been made about the movement’s tonal C major C minor dichotomy, the minor sonorities representing a fledgling form of what would become Wagner’s bread and butter, Sturm und Drang, and the major sonorities representing transcendence and triumph. Indeed, it is this major-minor dichotomy that scholars point to as a hallmark of Beethoven’s “Heroic” period. Theme A takes the listener through a repeated 16th note pattern supporting a singing melody in the higher register of the piano. Soft and light quickly turns into a vigorous fist clenching series of alternating left and right-hand triplets only to return to the soothing harmonies of theme A. Theme C abruptly takes off with a series of unrelenting left-hand triplets beneath a pummeling hammer-esque quarter note staccato melody, again only to return home to the safety of theme A. We, however, find theme A in a different shape from its previous two iterations as Beethoven writes in a quasi 4th melody, spacious and dreamlike yet anxious in quality, sandwiched between two repetitions of theme A material. Once over, Beethoven now takes us through another iteration of the thematic theme B material as a segue to the monumental theme A coda, the joyous V-I sonorities of which emphatically state victory over the movement’s anxious alterations.
Like much of Beethoven’s music, the “Pathétique”, “Moonlight” and “Hammerklavier” sonatas come to mind, a successful listen of the “Waldstein” demands a certain emotional maturity and appreciation for intellectual rhetoric. With the “Waldstein”, as part and parcel of the enlightenment rhetoric sweeping over Europe at the time, Beethoven emphatically yet painstakingly asserts light over dark, fraternity over singularity, and reason over emotion. It is these very human impulses that continue to speak to Beethoven’s listeners across space and time, even after two centuries from its composition.
4.9/5.
